Author: David Hinde

Developing Your Project Management Capabilities

What skills do you need to be a great project manager? How do you develop those skills using training and coaching? Project management is a challenging role. You sit between upper management giving you demanding targets, and the production teams telling you how difficult it is to achieve those targets. It’s rather like being the […]

Why Do So Many Projects Deliver Late? (And How to Avoid this on our Projects)

Why do so many projects deliver late and how do we avoid it? Eliyahu Goldratt in his book Critical Chain, observed that when we give estimates we often secretly add some padding to the figure. This is our safety margin, because we all confuse the word estimate with commitment. Now you might think that in […]

Battle of the Planning Tools: Gantt Charts versus Burndown Charts

In this article I will look at two useful planning techniques: creating Gantt Charts and creating Burndown Charts. Both have their pluses and minuses. Gantt Charts were named after Henry Gantt, who invented them in the early part of the twentieth century. Burndown Charts are often used in agile environments to track the progress of […]

Seven Steps to Successfully Closing a Project

Shutting a project down successfully isn’t easy. Some projects never seem to end and drift on and on, whereas others close in a heated mess of confusion as we strive to meet a deadline. Here are seven tips that can help you successfully close your projects. Hold a final product review. As the project draws […]

Seven Steps to a Successful Project Start Up

One of the greatest temptations in any project is to stop analyzing and planning the project and just get on with the “real” work of creating the products. Wasting time with unnecessary analysis is of course a bad thing, but rushing into the work can actually turn out to be a false economy, leading to […]